Arkansas’ Birds Dead: Killed by HAARP’s Death Ray?

Were the red-winged blackbirds so depressed by the economy they decided to commit collective suicide in protest? Or is government bird testing to blame. You decide.

John Fitzpatrick, the Director of Cornell University’s Ornithology Lab, said a “washing machine-type thunderstorm” suddenly appeared in Arkansas and sucked the red-winged blackbirds up into its midst and spat them back out onto the ground. Fitzpatrick says this is the most likely explanation for the strange phenomenon of the black birds falling from the sky.

A little research on the Internet reveals that thunderstorms do suddenly appear in time and space. Random, quantum thunderstorms. Magical realism come to life.

That theory works until one considers that there were no reports of a storm over Beebe, Arkansas, where the birds fell from the sky like the frogs in P.T. Anderson’s “Magnolia.”

The other theory so far is that a high degree of “stress” (brought on by New Year’s fireworks or Arkansasians firing shotguns into the air) caused the blackbirds to take flight from their roost. It follows that they either all simultaneously had heart attacks then fell, or became so disoriented from the effects of the booms and flashes that they nose-dived onto streets, cars, houses, etc. But even if these arethe ultimate explanations, why is this the first we’ve heard of the theory? Someone needs to investigate who writes Fitzpatrick’s check.

Anyone who has ever watched the Fox show “Fringe” knows that disasters and strange phenomena always have a sinister government twist. The usual methods of scientific inquiry cannot explain such events. Religion cannot explain such events. And so it is left to more paranormal forms of inquiry to make sense of such phenomena. Anyone who has ever read Charles Fort’s paranomal classic “The Book of the Damned” will attest to the fact that science and religion sometimes don’t know shit. (Read “The Fortean Times” magazine for a regular dose of the anomalous paranormal so beloved by its namesake.)

Fort was a lateral thinker. For instance, he noted that in 1883 a strange light could be seen all over the night sky across the world. This was the year of the famous volcanic explosion of Krakatoa, and many scientific authorities and observers blamed the glow on the explosion. Fort was able to prove that the glow had actually preceded the explosion of Krakatoa. Does this prove a conspiracy? No. But it does suggest that scientists weren’t exactly honest or were just plain stupid.

Apply this lateral thinking to the dead birds and fish of Arkansas and at the very least we must question the scientific theories (remember, they are only theories) of university professors and government scientists. Fitzgerald’s “washing machine-type thunderstorm” becomes just as laughable as any conspiracy theory.

And what of the conspiracy theories already bubbling up around the dead birds and fish?

The bodies of the Arkansas’ dead birds were hardly cold before Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists were blaming the government, the most likely explanation being HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program). HAARP is an experimental program conducting research into the ionospheric applications of high atmospheric technological applications, including missile detection, radio transmission, etc. (These are the admitted applications, remember.)

Much of the attention directed at HAARP has been drawn to the program’s IRI (ionospheric research instrument), which is capable of “exciting” certain areas of the atmosphere. The ionosphere, full of electrons, heavily influences the Earth’s electricity and radio transmission. And so HAARP’s research with the IRI has given rise to comparisons to Nikola Tesla’s Death Ray, causing many conspiracy theorists–including Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez—to believe that the IRI can cause earthquakes, storms, power outages, and on and on.

For many, it is not a stretch to assume the dead birds over Beebe, Arkansas were the victim’s of HAARP’s “Death Ray” and maybe even the fish, too.

Then again, maybe these creatures suffer from clinical depression, fried nerves or were sucked up into a washing machine thunderstorm as Fitzpatrick suggests.